Twitter Denies Definite Limits On Following

It's probably not a safe assumption that there's a limit on the number of people one can actually follow on Twitter. After all, it's possible someone has no life to prevent them being able to monitor a stream of thousands. Hey, if people actually camped out or bought scalped tickets to see "The Dark Knight" instead of just waiting 12 hours, then it's possible to justify almost anything.

It's sort of requirement, for example, that 237 people very poorly. I'm fond of a few of them, but wouldn't notice if many of them disappeared off the face of the Earth, and have no interest in building up a huge list of people to follow. This is generally how I am in real life, too. If in the real world you're a Calacanis, tweeting incessantly and saying nothing, then you'll be unfollowed quicker than I can start my car and drive away.

I've got things to do.

But with something like Twitter, it's not about managing the personality quirks and relative gregariousness of one person. It's about managing all types in the fairest of ways as well as Twitter spam. Bloggers this morning nonetheless were miffed at new restrictions put on the number of people one can follow.

The current follow threshold appears to be 2,000, as "I've lost my sheep" crisis. Due to targeting "aggressive followers," some accounts lost up to 75 percent of their followers.

In another

there is no perfect formula. We do our best by taking a multi-dimensional approach. We look at a number of factors—including how many people are following you back—before applying limits. We don't reveal exact limits, because it's somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google's PageRank, they'd just engineer their way around them much more easily.

So, there you go. No official limits, no magic number. Other observers have noted that aggressive action against spammers is not only important to general user base, but also in peripheral efforts to keep Twitter online as it attempts to scale.

Even others have been so bold as to suggest a new business model, which involves offering premium Twitter accounts with higher follow limits. This suggestion wasn't so far off the mark as associates had mentioned charging for commercial Twitter accounts. The problem of determining commercial versus consumer, though, might prove challenging.